4 Ways Driver Misses Hurt Your Fleet’s Bottom Line (And What You Can Do About It)
By SkyBitz • Published May 8, 2018 • 5 minute read
Driver misses — the wild goose chases truck drivers must endure when trailers go missing — hurt driver morale, decrease loads per week, and increase fuel and maintenance costs. Learn how harmful driver misses are to trucking, and how to eliminate them with trailer tracking technology.
Time is money. Fleet managers understand that better than almost anyone. The key to getting ahead in the trucking industry is to make your operations more efficient and maximize loads per week, while minimizing overhead.
But one all-too-common truck driver nightmare may be standing in the way of your fleet’s profitability: driver misses. When you tell a truck driver to pick up a certain trailer at a specific location, and the driver arrives only to find the trailer isn’t where you said it would be, that’s a driver miss — and it forces your employee to go on a wild goose chases, trying to track the missing trailer down before time runs out.
Here are four ways driver misses hurt your bottom line, and what you can do to eliminate them.
1. Driver misses harm revenue by reducing loads per week.
Without a GPS trailer tracking solution, a driver miss can easily waste hours of your employees’ time. The driver often has to review a spreadsheet to triangulate where the missing equipment might be, then communicate with dispatch.
Dispatch tells the driver where the trailer was last seen, and then it’s on the truck driver to hunt that trailer down. From there, it’s a guessing game. If you’re lucky, the equipment may be in the wrong spot in the right yard, but even then, the driver has to comb the lot to track down the trailer.
If driver misses are a regular occurrence in your business, you’re not just killing productivity for one driver (and one dispatcher) for one day. You could be losing thousands of dollars in potential revenue by cutting into your loads per week due to inefficient processes and inadequate technology.
2. Driver misses make it harder to retain truck drivers.
Drivers often have to use their knowledge of the local area to track down trailer locations, considering nearby yards and past experiences to make a hypothesis as to where the missing equipment ended up. Hours of service requirements make this detective work even more frustrating, as your driver may run out of time before completing the job.
Not to mention, you can’t weather the current truck driver shortage if you can’t hold onto the drivers you already have. Instead of making your employees’ jobs unnecessarily difficult, you can invest in a trailer tracking solution that gives drivers greater trust in your processes and allows them to focus on the road.
3. Driver misses can blow a hole in fuel and maintenance budgets.
If an employee routinely has to drive a large truck 100 miles to the next yard to locate a missing trailer, it goes without saying that your fuel expenses will skyrocket. In addition, your trucks will incur far more wear and tear, requiring more maintenance and repairs.
4. You may risk losing contracts to competitors using fleet management technology.
Not only do driver misses reduce your loads per week (and potential revenue), drive up fuel and maintenance costs, and infuriate your truck drivers, but they also put you at a competitive disadvantage. Without the right technology and operational efficiencies to keep up with modern standards, you may lose contracts to one of your competitors.
Imagine your business shows up late to a delivery because your driver spent hours just trying to locate a lost trailer. What’s keeping your customer from switching to another trucking company with more reliable processes — especially if you have to pass the added costs of inefficiency onto the client?
Eliminate Driver Misses and Maximize Runs Per Week with SkyBitz
While driver misses can have a disastrous effect on your business, the good news is that they’re by no means inevitable. Knowing where your assets are at all times will streamline your operations, reduce budget, and give you the efficiency you need to increase loads per week.
Give yourself the technological advantage you need to trim overhead while increasing revenue. Customers who use SkyBitz InSight report operational savings of up to 7% just from using the app to track, monitor and manage their assets all from a convenient web app.
